Chapter Text
Nami punches him in the shoulder. Zoro barely moves with it.
She doesn’t fucking care. “Ever heard of a self-preservation instinct, asshole?”
She’s expecting something suitably dry in response. Maybe, I wouldn’t be sailing on this plank of wood if I had. But Zoro just drops his chin and walks further into the galley.
The ship’s galley is a warm cocoon, orange-gold light flickering over every wooden surface. Savoury meat and citrusy tang wind together in the air, and Usopp’s shut out the smell of the sea and the dark night behind the door. They’re safe.
But Nami’s jittery, hands flexing where they hang uselessly by her sides. It’s like facing the crew for the first time back at Coco Village, registering the green mop of hair atop an impassive face. Mindlessly grateful.
he made it.
And now Zoro’s pulled a stupid stunt and recovered miraculously again, except the part of her mind that never stills, never stops turning over, isn’t quite ready to give into the relief. Despite the warmth of the food in her belly, the light within these walls, the company of her friends. She’s steered her way out of enough storms to know when one hasn’t left their tail.
She looks at Luffy.
She always looks at Luffy when that prickle of danger-in-the-waters dances down her spine. He’s standing by the windows, watching Zoro, soft-eyed and solemn.
She sidles up to him, keeps her voice low. “You look worse than when he wasn’t waking up.”
And there it is, another missed cue from the script. Instead of he’s as strong as a bear, Nami, there’s nothing to worry about, Luffy meets her eyes and his lips curl gently.
“He’s upset.”
That… not worse than grievous injury. Than being maimed, or drifting off into a fevered sleep, never to wake again. “People get upset, Luffy.”
On the counter, Sanji sets down a lightly steaming plate. Zoro doesn’t raise his head, doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes. Mutters, “thanks.”
Sanji jerks in surprise, frown lines appearing around a pursed-pink mouth. His gaze immediately flits up to Nami and Luffy over Zoro’s shoulder.
Well, shit.
She considers it for a couple, extended beats. Over the sounds of Usopp filling the air with fluff, and Zoro’s spoon clinking against the bowl.
(“It’s your fatal flaw.” Nojiko had said over the bonfires of Arlong Park. As pretentious as always. “You can’t not do anything.”)
She takes a seat on the bench right next to Zoro. The spoon doesn’t stop clinking.
She leans an elbow on the counter, an orange wisp drifting to hang over her cheek. “So what happened?”
Zoro finishes his mouthful slowly, jaw working for seemingly unending seconds. He looks straight at the stove in his eyeline, expression unchanging. “I overslept.”
The irritation snaps in her belly like a Venus fly trap. She can feel Sanji in their periphery too, the rustle of his jacket seams shifting on his shoulders, the intake of breath prior to the righteous reproach. She interrupts before he can, voice perfectly level, “Okay. The next time you oversleep for twenty-eight hours after drinking an unidentified liquid, I’m going to drop you straight into the ocean.”
Zoro’s gaze shifts out of the middle-distance, like the food under his nose and Nami’s voice in his ear is suddenly more real. He blinks, tone sounding vaguely conciliatory. “… I’m fine.”
Like she’s demanding information about his wellbeing, instead of threatening to kill him. Because she is doing the first thing.
God, they’re both idiots.
She scans his face. No sweaty sheen over the brow, only a cursory sort of paleness. No tight lines to the jaw. Nothing to indicate that he’s hiding pain.
Another shift in their vicinity, before Sanji says carefully, “Sleep alright?”
Zoro doesn’t twitch. “Yeah.”
Oh. “Bad dreams?” Nami tests.
Zoro’s spoon settles down with a clatter. “No.”
He goes at the chunks of meat with his fingers, chewing silently. Nami’s gut still isn’t satisfied. It’s feeling like he’s going to stay unresponsive throughout – until his shoulders straighten and he says, “Aren’t you going to eat?”
Who –
“Soon.” Luffy responds, still warm, still keeping watch by the window.
And the route unfolds through the fog, crystal clear in the map of Nami’s mind.
She waits for him to finish. To lick the last smear of sauce from his thumb, swallow the last bite. To swing his legs out from the bench, facing outward and ready to stand – and she lets it ring out with every scrap of bluntness she has.
“If you aren’t going to tell the rest of us, you should at least tell Luffy.”
She sees the words hit him. Sees the jerk of the chin, sees them make an impact.
“Nami–” Usopp interjects hesitantly.
“No, it’s… fine.” Zoro says. His right hand is on the hilt of his sword, knuckles as white as the hilt. It’s not a threatening gesture.
“There’s nothing to tell.” Zoro says. “I was dreaming.”
It’s such a loaded word on this ship. Dream. It used to mean something childish, something Nami ought to have discarded like tangerine skin, back in the soil of childhood. But the scent lingers under your nails, its presence bursting across your awareness at the oddest moments.
“Anything to do with your greatest wish?”
“Doesn’t matter.” His tone is blank. She never appreciated how much Zoro truly inflected his words with until it’s been wiped of everything. “Wasn’t real.”
The light glints off yellow straw as Luffy moves through the cabin. The thought drifts through Nami’s mind, not for the first time, that it’s strange that he wears it indoors. Or at night.
Then she remembers it looming out of the shadows in the smoke of Coco Village. Trapping moonlight in the dark and settling gently on the crown of her head.
Luffy reaches Zoro’s side, and the softness is only enhanced by the strength of his smile. His voice is quieter than usual.
“Real is made up,” he says.
And his long, brown, knobbly fingers reach out and cover Zoro’s over the katana hilt. It’s subdued by his usual standards, except Zoro… lifts his chin to stare, looking like his chest has stopped moving. Like brushing your knuckles over a sacred relic; Nami feels the intrusion of it, that hand on that sword, in her bones.
Luffy squeezes down. Zoro exhales.
He nods, abrupt and brusque, and Luffy pulls away and declaims at a much more Luffy-ish volume. “Pot roast time!!”
Zoro keeps walking, haltingly, towards the doorway. Nami’s legs move before her mind is made aware.
“We’re here.” She doesn’t dare reach out but her voice wavers.
He turns his head.
If you… if you ever. If you want to.
Like you were for me.
There’re a dozen ways to finish the sentiment, but Nami doesn’t have a sword to pledge or a straw hat with nigh magical properties.
“We’re here,” she says again, and Zoro meets her eyes –
“I know.” A short pause, and then unsentimentally, “you’re my friends.”
“Damn straight.” She blurts reflexively and waits till he leaves the room to smile at the door.
~
After Kuina died, Koushirou Sensei started standing in the dojo after the day’s lessons were complete. He was a still man by nature, but there was something different to the set of his shoulders in those hours. His eyes amphibian-like, with a third, translucent lid that shut out all moisture.
His stillness in those afternoons, with the sun’s long orange rays grasping over the mats, no longer felt deliberate.
Zoro asked him once if he was meditating. It took a minute full of the cicadas buzzing outside in the fields, for the man’s lips to move.
“Meditation is no way out of turmoil. It’s what you come to after.”
So Zoro doesn’t try to meditate the following night on the Merry. He stares at the back of his eyelids for an hour, and then another. He thinks about training on the deck for half a minute, but the ring of steel on steel and bowing before a bout is too fresh.
He used to bow before solo practices too. He doesn’t remember stopping. He doesn’t remember deciding to. But it must have happened somewhere, lost to the Demon of the East.
Having it all again is like… Zoro remembers that things used to be different. But memory is only the echo of the feeling. A shadow on rice paper doors. So he remembers being ten years old and he remembers wanting to beat Kuina and become the greatest swordsman in the world.
But in the other world – the one that Luffy said wasn’t any different from reality – Zoro knew what it was like to feel that once more. Their shared dream, fierce and living, instead of being a shrine to one.
The Merry creaks about him, Usopp’s snores gently perforating the air. The waiter is mostly silent in his hammock. Luffy snuffles in his sleep.
We’re here, Nami’s voice intrudes, almost indignant at being sidelined. We’re here we’re here we’re here.
Zoro does share a dream, still.
Until the end. Until we find the One Piece, or die trying.
He keeps his eyes closed, heart beating steadily.
When he wakes up again, he almost doesn’t realise he’d fallen asleep. But he must have, because –
“I, Shimotsuki Kuina, vow to fight, train, and kick your butt, every single day.”
“You are my Captain, Luffy. And I am your first mate.”
Memories tumbling through his head like sand. Faster and faster, till the blood in his veins races to keep pace, pulse tearing away.
“I need you, Zoro.”
“There was an accident. She’s gone.”
Zoro wakes up on land.
~
He’s distracted during training.
Kuina beats the shit out of him, and it’s so enraging that Zoro bares his teeth at her and slices half an inch off her ponytail. Blue hair showers to the ground, some of it drifting over to stick to his sleeve.
He shakes it free, blade arcing wildly with the motion. Kuina’s panting, but she spares the energy to raise her eyebrows.
Dreams, the physical kind that come at night, sometimes repeat themselves. But this is a continuation. Like the real flow of time divvied up into days, ordered by past, present and future. Like Zoro had just gone to sleep and woken up normally, in a house at the feet of snowy mountains with his childhood best friend.
Like the pirate ship was the dream.
His heart is buoyant and his ribs are caving in. His stance falls away, swords dangling loose enough that Kuina could twist them out of his grip in an instant.
She stands there, with the same expression on her face as the day she’d been twelve and prodded him about his tendency to drop his elbow. It makes her look foreign all of a sudden – this grown woman with the same disappointed face as his friend.
(They told Zoro he couldn’t see her face again. They wouldn’t let him. He sat cross-legged at his windowsill, watching the sun rise. Watching the scarlet spill over the sky and smelling the smoke from the pyre.
He asked for her sword.)
And now Kuina’s lips are pulled down in a little semi-circle, like she never went away. She was always just standing here, waiting for him to put up a decent challenge.
“I swear you used to be better at losing.”
Kuina slides her – his – the white-hilted sword back into its sheath. Zoro grunts.
They walk back to the house in silence. Gather up their meagre belongings and make for the docks.
The ocean waves are green and froth tipped. Kuina whistles tunelessly as she leans against a post and stares out into the horizon. She’s wearing grey from top to toe, a high-collared, billowing tunic over leggings. It looks like a collage of things that have been cut out of disparate pictures – the mountains, the ocean, and Kuina. All together.
The thought dislodges something in his brain. “How long did I sleep last night?”
Kuina’s whistle breaks off. She squints against the wind. “How am I supposed to know?”
Not too long then. Not as long as he was awake in the other world. Maybe it only goes one way. Nami had been visibly distraught at his 28-hour nap – would suck to have to face that again.
The thought coalesces, slow but sure. This is… probably going to happen again.
The sloop they’re waiting on is bobbing on the water. It’s small and rickety, compared to the Merry. The air is full of sea spray and wooden planks creaking and sailors’ yells.
This is going to keep happening. And two swords hang at Zoro’s hip, even though most people only ever vow themselves to one.
Kuina’s voice slices through the breeze. “Zoro.”
Zoro squints back. “What?”
“It’s freaky when you smile like that.”
Zoro considers the words, something both foreign and deeply familiar pulling at his lips. The last time he’d relented to this, he was in a cast-off ceremony with his pirate crew.
It’s like swallowing the wind whole, a near-giddiness sitting under the chest.
“I,” Zoro says, “am gonna beat you in training tomorrow.”
Kuina snorts. “O-kay.”
~
Things fall into a pattern after that.
He switches between two worlds every time he sleeps. The body he occupies in each is different, riddled with different scars depending on his past experiences there. But he keeps both sets of memories.
Zoro doesn’t really get tired, even though he no longer has the luxury of sleep to separate his days. His eyes don’t burn, his skin doesn’t feel stretched out. It’s like one of those old fables – ikiryō that leave the body sleeping, while the souls go and do something else.
He gets double the amount of training. It's great.
He watches Kuina’s footwork on fields of packed dirt, on grassy meadows, on worn and creaking ship decks. He learns to watch his peripheral vision when sparring with Luffy, block any errant limbs swinging through the air with rubbery range. He fights with Wado in the morning and fights against Wado in the night – or maybe it’s the other way round.
The 28-hour nap was a one-time thing. He still doesn’t know why. His Going Merry crew don’t know that he’s still moving between worlds while asleep. If it starts making a difference to his functioning on the ship, he’ll tell them.
It should be odd, acclimating to having Kuina in his life again. And it is, but only in moments. Moments when her teeth show as she’s yawning or smiling at a street kid. The other times she’s just Kuina. He elbows her out of the doorway when they’re both sleepy in the mornings, and tunes out her yammering about drinking more water, and shares a companionable cup of loose leaf when the insects are loudest at dusk, and they both have their feet on the ground and eyes on the hazy vermilion horizon.
Zoro still hasn’t gotten used to her earring. Or when she folds her arms over her chest, shoulders squared and immoveable, and he realises she picked that one up from him.
Their first bounty together that isn’t an acquired memory, Zoro notices that she doesn’t dodge. She’s the fastest opponent he’s ever matched a blade with – better than Kuro, ‘cause she can see where she’s fucking going – but as the bandits bring down their clubs and swords and spinning pikes, Kuina doesn’t shimmer out of the way. She doesn’t even divert the blows like Zoro would; she roots her heels and straightens her back and takes every hit on her blade. They tower above her, tank-sized men with snarls on their faces, and she breaks their attack with a glint in her eye.
She gets to the bandit leader first, and his kama is the size of her head. He roars and brings the wide-bladed sickle down, plenty of time to dance away – but Wado Ichimonji is braced in a sideways grip and the sickle screeches against the tempered steel. He bears down with bull-sized shoulders and she keeps her chin parallel to the ocean and remains unmoving, the ship groaning under the weight. Then her katana pivots sharply forward, and the bandit skids several metres backwards with the force. Along the edge of the sword, her dark iris is visible over the diamond-head hilt like a crescent.
Zoro bisects four different idiots while this is occurring – he doesn’t need to hurry. The kama has already gone flying from the bandit’s grip with the last deflection, and by the time Zoro makes it to the aft deck, the wood is slippery with blood. Kuina flicks the scarlet off her katana and sheathes it with exacting form.
Zoro’s eyebrows are hovering at a greater height than usual. Did he… know that Kuina blocked attacks from men thrice her size?
Yes, his memories of this life inform him. Yes, he did.
Has he asked her about it?
No he hasn’t – and Zoro sheathes his swords with a little less pageantry, if only to punctuate the point. “You don’t dodge.”
Both their boots are still slick with blood. Kuina regards him with a disingenuous confusion. “I dodged your attacks this morning. You still have the scrapes on your chin.”
From nearly skinning his face on a fucking tree – thanks Kuina. Zoro doesn’t back down. “Yeah, because you’d lose a hand if you tried that shit with me.”
“You mean carving through the enemy?”
“I mean wasting energy where you don’t need to.” Zoro folds his arms over his chest. “What if they break through your defence and you can’t block the attack?”
Her spine is straighter than the mast of the ship. Her chin has shot up like she’s bristling. “What if they’re faster than me and I can’t dodge? Hypotheticals are worth shit, Zoro.”
“Yeah, but–”
“How about,” she cuts through, deadly precise, “you leave the worrying to me for when I inevitably go up against someone stronger?”
“Girls can beat boys. But no woman can ever beat a man.”
Her ponytail whips through the air as she storms off.
Right. So Kuina’s still weird about… all of that. Stuff.
Good to know.
~
She’s cheery again by the time they collect the bounty, the sack with the bandit’s head a crusty burgundy-brown when they hand it over. The Marine captain looks from her face to the sack and back again and makes no comment.
They take a room at the local inn for the night. Zoro falls asleep in a bed and spends a day sailing and playing catch-the-hat with Luffy on the unending path to the Grand Line. Goes back to his hammock at sunset and wakes in the blue-grey of predawn to an empty inn room.
He gets off the bed. Eases the closet door open, scratching blearily at his stomach, searching for the shirt he hung there last night. It takes a couple of sleep-laden blinks to register the ivory, sword-length gleam at the edge of his vision.
It’s Wado Ichimonji, propped against the wall in the far corner of the closet.
Something hard immediately consolidates in the pit of his stomach. Zoro bends forward and picks up the sword, squashing the warring, unnerved urge that tells him he shouldn’t. He does succumb to the impulse to check how many earrings hang from his ear.
Two. It’s two.
He doesn’t strap the katana to his belt. He fastens his ungraded swords, while Wado’s binding sits familiarly against his callouses, and he walks straight out of the door and down the stairs to the lower landing, searching –
“Zoro. Why do you have my sword.”
She’s standing at the counter, with the pink-haired inn proprietor on the other side. Her voice is flat, her hair imperfectly knotted at the crown into her usual ponytail. She isn’t wearing a single weapon – like wandering out in the forest with bare feet but a thousand times worse.
Zoro’s tone is sharper. “You left it.”
Kuina tilts her head at the girl across the counter. “Sora runs a tight ship. It would’ve been safe in the room.”
Zoro stares. The response is so beyond the pale that he struggles for words. “It’s not about safety.”
“Then you can put it back where you found it.” Kuina turns back to the proprietor, presumably resuming the interrupted conversation. “We’ll extend the room by two more days.”
There’s a nod and some scribbling on a ledger, before Kuina swivels on her feet to – walk straight out the door?
“Training?” Zoro blurts. He hasn’t even begun to skim the surface of this conversation, things moving too rapidly in confusing directions.
“Go on without me, I’ll take the day.” Kuina says.
Take the – what?
And she goes right out the damned door.
He’s frozen still for a minute, every instinct in his body loud in its unwillingness to leave Wado Ichimonji behind. But Kuina’s just left the establishment like she doesn’t realise she has a limb missing, and he can’t not follow. And she was explicit in her wishes about her sword.
So he tramps back up the landing and leans the katana against the wall where he found it, movements slow and careful to inadequately make up for the sacrilege. Every step away after closing the door feels like rowing against the current. But he does it and thuds down the stairs and finds himself out of the inn and on the streets.
He picks a direction and starts walking, before remembering to look down the length of the road both ways. There in the opposite direction, in the twilight, is a blue head of hair.
He catches up to her easily. Begins by setting out the base facts. “You’re a swordswoman.”
(“Pirate. Hunter.” He remembers enunciating each consonant, back on the pole in Shell’s Town. Like he was fooling anyone.)
It’s more jarring than if she had lost a hand. Her side profile in the pallid light is the same – the slightly broad nose, rounded chin, square shoulders. But the silhouette still looks like it belongs to someone else, someone who can’t feel the absence of the katana at their hip.
Kuina doesn’t look in his direction. “Does a ship’s captain need to tow his boat on land to prove he’s a captain?”
No, but he does wear his hat everywhere. Zoro can feel his lips curve up at the thought.
He gets it though. Luffy is a captain, even when he isn't whooping on the ram's figurehead of the Merry or leaping into battle.
"This is different." Zoro says. Thinks of every time he’s refused to surrender his swords at an establishment. The buzz of unease in his stomach grows stronger.
They come to an intersection. Kuina turns right and Zoro follows at her shoulder.
“I know,” she says. The words don’t sound as nonchalant as she’s been all morning. “I’m just… trying something.”
A couple blocks down, they turn in to a small black gate and duck through to an apartment entrance. A lady with iron grey hair lets them in, bows and leads them through the ground floor to a room in the back. There are three chabudai in the room, running lengthwise with their shorter ends pushed together. Thinly padded floor cushions sit on either side of the low tables, sepia squares of paper and wooden brushes on the tabletops.
“Shodo.” Even if he could’ve imagined a reason for Kuina wanting to skip training, this wouldn’t have been it. "Don’t you already know how to write?”
The question is rhetorical; Zoro was there. For every mind-numbing lesson, every time he stifled a yawn behind his fists while his classmates sat moulded in perfect discipline and nodded at the instructor up by the front. Every time he accidentally cracked the sumi stick by pressing too hard, or made the ink too watery, or flicked some on Kuina’s nose instead of the paper. He was here to learn to fight, damn it.
He doesn’t remember Kuina being interested in shodo. He thought she just did it for her father, blue head bowed scrupulously over the paper. For anything that would let her keep the katana at her hip for just a little while longer.
It’s not like he doesn’t remember her doing anything else but fight – tiny mouth pursed over a meal she doesn’t like, pointing out a scudding cloud in the sky. But he can’t think of her and not think of their dream. The memories of training, of bowing to her across a field with the sun rising over the twinned gleam of their blades, wash out everything else.
Kuina kneels beside one of the tables now with ease. Jerks her chin at the adjacent spot.
Zoro finds a corner away from the shodo stations. Folds his arms. “I’ll sit here with my swords, thanks.”
Zoro waits for some pinch-nosed elder to make his way into the room to guide the lesson, but they remain undisturbed. There’s nothing but the rustle of Kuina’s sleeve as it sweeps over the chabudai. The room smells of ink and faint, woody traces of hojicha.
Kuina places a hand on the paper in front of her. A gentle, barely there touch. Shoulders still straight, she leans forward and positions three fingers on the dark stick of ink. She exhales.
And just like that, they’re back on the training field.
Zoro knows that sound. Knows it even when he isn’t hearing it, just marking the motion as she steadies her focus on the opponent. He takes in her stance by habit – the equal spacing between her fingertips on the stick, the angle at which it is ground into the faint depression of the inkstone.
She lays the ink stick down and picks up the brush like there’s only one right way to do it. She dips its bristles into the ink and guides it over the paper, leaving behind a starkly certain trail. Lift and stroke, down and to the right and up again. Her wrist doesn’t swivel, she’s using just her arm to shape the characters. As methodical as she’s ever been in a fight.
Wrists braced on the hilt of his swords, Zoro watches. The unease in his stomach has gone quiet. In this moment, she’s not the person he remembers. An image of a girl with a sword, fossilised in grief.
She doesn’t have to be.
By the time she finishes, the sun is casting gold rectangles on the tatami under the windows. Zoro’s breathing is deep and steady. Kuina unfolds out of seiza, grimaces only a little as she pushes to her feet from kneeling.
She looks at him, and there’s a flash of vulnerability, there and gone on her face.
Zoro looks back. Dips his chin. “Good training.”
Kuina laughs, a little stutter of sound in a bright, golden room.
~
It’s not creepy to monitor someone’s sleeping habits.
Really.
Nami used to know the routines of Arlong’s crew by memory – Kuroobi waking at the crack of dawn, the heavy, wet slap of his feet and rattle of his gills. The little puff in the air as Chew spewed a projectile into the air – he liked to doze through the afternoons and came alive at dusk. Arlong’s smooth, obsidian laugh, echoing in the map room. Sometimes, she’d find herself moving through rooms in Arlong Park reflexively, only realising after the fact that she’d heard something and her body had reacted.
Danger came from unpredictability, and Nami couldn’t be scared all the time. Not if she was going to save her village. She needed to convince her body, even if her mind stuttered. So she made them all predictable, crammed their habits and footsteps into her head.
It’s served her well, burgling into places that were once thought impregnable. Places were like people, with their own habits. Once she drew the shape of them in her mind, she could go in and out, easy.
All to say, that she has valid justifications for monitoring – noticing, really, that Zoro doesn’t nap anymore.
He’ll lie so very still in his hammock, eyes closed and lashes darkening his cheekbones. He’ll breathe steadier than the westerlies, chest rising and falling, doing an overall excellent impression of sleep. He used to do that before too, usually when Nami was cribbing about all the work left to be done on deck, but not all the time.
These days, when the sun is up in the sky, Zoro doesn’t sleep a wink. Nami could bet her last berry on that.
There are other changes that are less suspici – notable. His shoulders are lighter. He’s less inwardly focused. Once, he lingered on the deck with Usopp and Nami when the sun was coming up from the sea, water pink as a sakura blossom. She didn’t think he was the kind to appreciate something as ephemeral as a sunrise; at least not the Zoro from a few weeks ago.
So here she is, relaxing on the quarterdeck with an open bottle of rum, keeping a watchful eye on a green head of hair below. She’s maybe hoping for the warm aroma of booze to do the enticing for her, but their newest crewmate comes to the rescue instead. The moment Sanji’s head pops out of the galley door, Zoro turns a hundred and eighty degrees and heads in her direction.
Nami can’t help the tiny smirk sitting on her lips. When Zoro stops by the ship’s wheel and fixes his eyes on the bottle, she generously pulls out a shot glass for this very occasion and indulges him with a heavy pour.
She pulls straight from the bottle and tops him up twice. The wind whistles peacefully through the sails. The second time, she arches an eyebrow and says, “You haven’t been able to look at Sanji in the eye since yesterday. What’s the deal?”
She isn’t expecting him to answer. It’s part of the tactic – throw in a couple questions that she isn’t really angling for, so he feels like he’s sufficiently indulged in his stoic shtick. Then hit him with the insightful stuff when he’s sufficiently mellow.
Instead, Zoro leans on the main mast, shot glass loosely dangling from one hand and the other not braced on his seventeen and a half swords. He looks… open. There’s something to his eyes, a curious lightness as he looks back at her, like he’s actually considering it.
Nami finds herself leaning forward inadvertently in interest.
Zoro shakes his head, tone slightly rueful like he’s going to regret this decision. “So I was fighting K-... someone.”
“At Oharu Islands?” Nami jumps in immediately. “I knew you couldn’t have taken that long just getting back from the markets.”
“Yeah, sure.” The ship’s sails billow, and light slants through the gap and over Zoro’s hair like a sun-soaked meadow. “Anyway, this person was a swordsman and when they disarmed me–”
Hang on, what? “They disarmed you?”
“One sword, no big.” Zoro dismisses. “So I duck a swipe to the head, and since my right hand’s free, I pivot on the ground and kick ‘em on the chin.”
Nami tries to picture it, rum sitting warm in her belly. She can’t.
“Like… one hand on the ground, one leg straight up?”
Zoro flushes dully.
Hang on a minute. A pair of long legs in well-tailored trousers flash through Nami’s head and suddenly, she can picture it just fine.
Ha!
“I…” She starts slowly, mischief sneaking in at the sides of her grin, “need to tell Sanji.”
Zoro keeps silent. There’s a muscle jumping in his jaw.
Nami shakes her head wondrously. “Guy deserves to know just how inspirational you find him.”
“It was appropriate to the situation.” Zoro grits out. He still doesn’t have a wrist braced on his swords. And then, stiffly. “No skin off my back if you do.”
“Sure Zoro. You’re so cool with it, you haven’t been avoiding him at all.” Nami smiles back generously. She likes her crew most days of the week, enough that she memorises their ways out of habit instead of survival. But some days are just special.
Zoro doesn’t respond. His expression is still strained, but his body language doesn’t betray a whole lot of tension. Like… it’s embarrassing, sure, but worth sacrificing a little dignity over sharing it with a friend.
Nami finds her smile softening. She didn’t know Zoro had it in him.
“Did it at least work?”
“Kinda.” Zoro shrugs. His jaw has eased up a tad, tiny little creases around the eyes. “Definitely threw her off her rhythm.”
Nami notes the pronoun absently. Not a lot of swordswomen out there.
They have another drink. Sometimes, Nami drinks just so she can smell something other than the sea, but this is… pleasant. Gaze drifting over the waves, almost absently, she hears herself ask –
“Tastes better than the treasure bottle, doesn’t it?”
She feels the tension wind back into Zoro’s frame. For a moment, she almost hates herself – but the spike of emotion just fades into the general miasma.
“You tried it?” The question comes, though it’s phrased too flat.
Nami looks over at him.
“What do you think?”
Zoro doesn’t blink, for several long moments. His tone isn’t hostile. “Wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
If this had been Arlong Park… oh, the crew would have ripped through each other, for that bottle. Either to try it themselves or sell it to the highest bidder. Not overtly of course, Arlong had them too well trained for that, but the deals and the double crosses – Nami can see it play out in her mind in picture perfection.
But no one on the Going Merry is the kind to take shortcuts to their dreams.
“I don’t know what it would show me.” Nami says. Confesses, really. “I want to draw a map of the world, but I don’t know what the world looks like. I like the idea of it, but I wouldn’t know how to picture it. Make it solid.”
Greatest wish, that Marine cadet had said. Greatest wish, and Nami hadn’t thought about pirate crews or maps or the empty edges of the world, waiting to be filled. She remembered, instead. Red hair, always slick to the scalp with sweat, hard hands that were accustomed to working. A warm voice. Tangerine windmills.
The only thing more impossible than a dream was a memory.
She swigs another mouthful, the booze burning through her throat. When she looks up, Zoro’s eyes are fixed on her steadily.
She doesn’t look away. “What does being the greatest swordsman in the world look like?”
“Don’t know.” Zoro says. It’s a confession on its own.
It pairs with his first one pretty easily. The one back at Baratie when they were drinking, just like this.
“I had one friend.”
Nami thinks about having Belle-Mere back for a day. Only one day. She can’t tell if the burn down her throat is alcohol or bile. “… I’m sorry.”
Zoro’s shrug is a half-hearted thing.
It sounds torturous. And yet. “I’d give a lot to have one day as a kid again.”
Zoro rubs at his mouth with his knuckles. “We weren’t kids in the dream.”
Nami blinks. Reimagines it without Belle-Mere needing to kneel down to meet her eyes. Would she be taller than her mother?
“It’s worse somehow.” Zoro says. Stares out at the ocean. “Getting to know who we never got to be.”
We. Like the version of Zoro who had gotten to keep his one friend was as dead as the friend who left him behind. Like the version of Nami who never knew the touch of manacles on a bony wrist, whose worst crime was burgling a book of maps in childhood instead of a hundred thousand berry’s worth of them.
“Nojiko says,” Nami’s pour is still perfect, despite the weaving waves under the Merry’s hull and the alcohol coursing in her veins. “that even though we weren’t related, my mother lives on in me. That there’s something of her left in this world as long as I’m still around.”
That I can’t ever take a shortcut to where she might be.
Zoro holds his glass steady under Nami’s hand. “That sucks.”
He doesn’t drink yet, eyes still caught by the tumult of the ocean. “They deserve better.”
Than us, Nami completes in her mind. Agrees. Who wants that kind of burden? Who wants to be tasked with remembering the best person you ever knew? That every time a detail slips from your mind, it disappears from the world. The burden of keeping someone whole and alive in yourself when they were ten times the person you could ever hope to be.
She lifts her glass anyway. Waits until Zoro’s eyes turn away from the sea, until they come seeking back to her. “To never forgetting.”
Zoro clinks his glass to hers, the impact jarring up Nami’s arm. She closes her eyes against the feeling of wind and salt spray on her cheek and tips the liquid into her mouth – remembering.